I have been accused by many of my colleagues and friends as being hypomanic. They always wonder how I get so much done. Do I function on 4 – 5 hours of sleep? Is it the fact that I am not married or don’t have kids? Well those things definitely help, but I think it’s because I have a rigorous structure in my daily life, that allows me to get so much done. Before we get into the post, I want to recommend two books to read that were recommended to me by my friend Scott Weingart: Getting Things Done by David Allen and Deep Work by Cal Newport. There are some pretty extreme ideas in both of these books, but if you can get past that, you can find truth in each of their arguments. These two books have changed the way I structure my daily life and have increased not only my productivity, but the quality of my productivity (i.e. Getting Things Done).

Let’s Start with Some Stats?

In July 2012 the Mckinsey Global Institute published a survey [1] with some pretty interesting stats about the percent of the average workweek spent with technology:

>60% of our time is spent on electronic communication and internet searches

≈30% of that 60% is spent on email alone

This leaves ≈40% of our time to get things done

In an observational study of 3 emergency departments, 18 staff ED physicians were observed for 2 hours at a time [4]:

ED physicians interrupted on average 12.5x per hour

ED physicians rarely delayed the interruptions 0.8x per hour

What Structure do I Use in Getting Things Done?

Capture (Collection)

Clarification (Processing)

Organizing

Reflection (Reviewing)

Engaging (Actually Doing)

Capture (Collection):

New Ideas: I jot all my new ideas in a Moleskin notebook or Drafts app (Capture text and send it to almost anything) ($4.99 US)

Social Media: I use the Pocket app to save all social media I want to come back to later

Email: Email is its own capture technology, so there is nothing additional to do. Email is also a bit more complicated, check out the clarification section for more details

Blogs: I use Feedly (News aggregator) to capture all the new blog posts that are published on a daily basis

New Publications: For this I use two things in particular:

Read by QxMD, a free app that lets you see what is being published online before it ever hits print. This app allows you to follow up to 15 journals of your choosing. If you work at an academic institution, you can put in your libraries proxy, and if they have a subscription to the journal, you also get the PDFs for free.

Pubmed Alerts: This one is simple, just create a free account and send yourself emails as frequently or infrequently as you want about what has been published in the journals you choose to follow. Want to know how to do this? Checkout this great post by Natalie May at St. Emlyn’s Blog: Pubmed Alerts.

Clarification (Processing):

Email: The goal here is to get to Inbox 0. This doesn’t mean having zero emails, it means having zero actionable items in my email. I really only deal with my email in the mornings or maybe evenings depending on my clinical schedule. I don’t bother messing with email during the day. Anyone who needs to get a hold of me urgently already has my cell phone number and can call or text. I generally divide email into 4 categories

Action: If it’s something I need to do (single action) or a project (multiple actions to complete) I transfer all this into the Omnifocus App (Standard $39.99 US) so I can set dates/deadlines for myself

Reference: I download all my PDFs into the Evernote App. The beauty of this is you can search for any term within the PDF, to quickly find what you are looking for.

Events: I set these up in my calendar so I know when things are upcoming

Spam: Simply delete

After Capture and Process, I essentially have 6 categories I need to organize and review

Organizing:

Calendar: I am a Mac guy so I use iCal and sync this with all my devices, but google calendar works as well. This is a great way to keep track of what you have upcoming

Omnifocus: This is essentially a task manager. I turn all my action items into actions (Single Action) or Projects (Takes several steps to accomplish)

An important caveat here is to never overbook yourself on any given day. No more than 3 actions or projects on any given day

Reflection (Reviewing):

Daily: Check Omnifocus, email, drafts, feedly, social media (pocket app), and look at my next day on my calendar

Weekly: Look to see what my schedule looks like the next week (This is important so you are not waiting until the last second to get things done)

Monthly: Look to see what I have scheduled for the next month (This helps in not overbooking yourself)

Yearly: This is where I set my big goals for myself. This is what I want to achieve over the next year. This is important because it can help make decisions of yes or no when asked to work on things. Does this help me with my big goals or is it going to be a distraction?

In EMCrits Podcast 206, Scott introduced an interesting concept on how to decide on saying yes or no to requests (i.e. Speaking at a conference, Working on a book chapter, etc…). I have incorporated this into my decision making. The image below depicts this concept:

Engaging (Actually Doing):

Work on my actions and projects without distractions during scheduled times I have allotted myself

Other Things I do to Help Stay Focused:

Kill all the push notifications on your phone (Reduce distractions): I no longer get social media or email updates on my phone or any of my mobile devices. Just think every time your phone beeps or buzzes your first instinct is to see what is going on. Just kill these distractions and check them on your own time not on others time.

Schedule time with no interruptions (Deep work without distractions): I generally schedule 2 – 4 hour blocks on days that I don’t work clinically to work on projects, whatever they may be, without any distractions (professional activities performed in a state of distraction free concentration). These blocks of time do not occur everyday.

Have downtime (Re-energize): It is important to give your mind time off in order to improve insights, and recharge your energy. Examples of this maybe running, meditation, yoga, etc… One other thing I will mention here is I never work on anything when I am post night shift, as this is a day for me to reenergize

great advice. I got halfway through Deep Work before getting distracted by projects… you seem so engaged on social media- how do you manage this without getting distracted? program breaks throughout the day?

Hi Gerald,
I appreciate you reading and your question. I have scheduled times of 2 – 4 hours where I turn off all internet and cell phone use. That way I can focus on the tasks at hand without getting distracted. On the flip side of this, it is also important to schedule downtime without internet and cell phone use, as rest for your brain is just as important as an optimal working brain.

I think prioritization of our tasks is crucial for a safe life; one way that helps is the application of 80/20 Pareto’s principle. 80% of our results depend on 20% of our actions. This is greatly explained by Richard Koch in his book ‘The 80/20 principle’ (https://amzn.to/2rnYsnW).

According to Weingart’s schedule, the final combination to balance our life could be:

1. Know yourself –> Ikigai & Meditation

2. Prioritize_80/20 & Petrie triangle –> Deep Work

3. Organize –> GTD

Thanks for the opportunity to change my life. My patients, colleagues, family, and friends are grateful to you.

Sure Salim!
A comment on Asian Efficiency, a huge resource to improve our productivity. Most courses are not free; however, you can taste some free morsels online. The one I got (free) was a formidable email flow management, simple to implement with immediate results
hugs
roberto

I badly need this in my life.. as I look around my filthy house that looks like it has been hit by a bomb, feeling overwhelmed by my pile of work admin and tasks that I’ve been putting off for a long time, at the same time needing to refresh after a long week…

Do you find the Drafts app has advantages over, say, evernote? Which could also be used for jotting down ideas etc?

Hi Penny…the short answer is no…evernote is just fine for note taking…however the thing I like about drafts is it syncs with dropbox, google drive, omni focus, evernote, twitter, email, text message, and reminders. The reason this is so nice is if I want to file my reminder away, I literally just have to forward it to any of the above and done. The additional feature of evernote that I do like is that you can search key words on PDFs, which is not possible on Drafts and why I keep both. Hope that makes sense and GL.